Margaret Daly
Term: 1980
Career: Assistant, writer, executive features editor of Better Homes and Garden magazine; retired in 1999 from Meredith Custom Marketing, where she was the editorial marketing director.
Did you know: Graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar in 1959.

Cheryl Hall
Term: 1987
Career: After graduating from Southern Methodist University in 1973, returned to Dallas Morning News where she was a summer intern in 1972; promoted to business editor 10 years later; started “Ideas at Work” column in 1992.
Did you know: First elected governor in 1981 and rotated off board in 2003; Distinguished Achievement Award recipient in 1996.

Sue Thomson
Term: 1990
Career: Reporter for “Dollars & Cents” section of St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1970s and ‘80s; covered higher education before leaving paper to freelance for St. Louis Magazine and National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education

Sandy J. Duerr
Term: 1991
Career: Bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Northwestern; Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, 1989-90; business reporter and then editor at Louisville Times; business editor, Louisville Courier-Journal; executive editor of The (San Luis Obispo) Tribune since 1998.
Did you know: Organized 1991 convention in Washington, D.C., at which President George Bush spoke, the only time a sitting president has appeared at a SABEW event. Convention planning also led to romance with fellow governor Gary Klott. They married in November 1991 and had two children.

Jodi Schneider
Term: 1995
Career: After receiving master’s degree at Medill, served as business editor at Boulder Daily Camera and Orlando Sentinel before joining The Washington Post as local business editor in 1995; held variety of positions at U.S. News and World Report, Congressional Quarterly and American Banker; currently at Bloomberg News’ D.C. bureau.
Did you know: Blogged for a year about finding and keeping a job at dcworks.info

Susan Wells
Term: 1998
Career: With a bachelor’s degree from University of Georgia, worked for The Associated Press and trade journals before joining the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1979. Served as business editor from 1991-99. Retired from the AJC in 2008; currently writes for Georgian Legal Services Program.
Did you know: A master gardener at heart, she blogs for Home Depot.

Kathy Kristof
Term: 2003
Career: After graduating from the University of Southern California, covered banking for Los Angeles Business Journal; joined Los Angeles Times in 1989; written for The Financial Times, Bloomberg News and CBSMoneyWatch; contributing editor to Kiplinger’s Personal Finance.
Did you know: Took over Sylvia Porter’s syndicated financial column in 1991 and became a Jeopardy question.

Gail DeGeorge
Term: 2007
Career: A Michigan native, graduated from Oakland University in Rochester, Mich.; worked at The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer and Cincinnati Inquirer before heading to Florida; business reporter at The Miami Herald from 1984-86; BusinessWeek’s Miami reporter and bureau chief; named business editor at South Florida Sun Sentinel in 1998; joined Bloomberg News’ D.C. bureau in 2011.
Did you know: Wins award for longest book title: “The Making of a Blockbuster: How H. Wayne Huizenga built a sports and entertainment empire from trash, grit and videotape.”

Jill Jorden Spitz
Term: 2012
Career: University of Arizona alum; joined Reno Journal-Gazette in 1988 before moving in 1991 to Orlando Sentinel to cover Disneyworld and Universal Studios; started as business reporter at Arizona Daily Star in 1998; named business editor in 2004; promoted to assistant managing editor in 2004.
Did you know: Past president Arizona Press Club.

Related:
Notable Women Business Journalists
Women Play Major Role in SABEW and Business Journalism
Dorothea Brooks 1923-present. United Press International

By Henry Dubroff

Henry Dubroff founded Pacific Coast Business Times in 1999 with a leased Saab, a checkbook and a business plan. He remains chairman and editor of the Santa Barbara, Calif.-based business publication. He previously was editor of The Denver Business Journal and business editor at the Denver Post.

Fifty years ago, the business journal as we know it did not exist.

In Denver and a few other places, specialized weeklies made a stab at covering news from an economic perspective. However, most community-based business publications simply printed legal notices, public records and press releases. Original reporting was the exception rather than the rule.

Through the 1960s and the turbulent years of the post-Watergate era, business journals remained upstarts with little to offer aspiring writers and editors, who looked to national publications and regional dailies as content leaders and career destinations.

But beginning in the late 1970s, and especially after the economic recovery of the early 1980s, business journals began to move up in both quality of content and professional standing.

“Business journals were just starting to recognize that they could — and did — have real clout in their communities. While execution was generally pretty rough, there was a genuine interest in improvement — in writing, headlines, design, everything,” recalled Kent Bernhard, who joined American City Business Journals in 1994 and was editorial director until his retirement in 2010.

As relatively autonomous enterprises that worked for companies that increasingly valued quality and a competitive spirit, business journals flourished. They were quick to exploit the advantage of digital platforms and emails and did not follow their daily rivals down the money-losing road of free content.

By the onset of the Great Recession the business journal fully evolved. One-time upstarts were now the incumbents, serving as the primary source for local and regional business and financial news in communities across the country.

In 2013, the Society of American Business Editors and Writers counted nearly 600 business journal staffers among its members; roughly one in five SABEW members works for a business journal or a company where business journals are a substantial part of the overall enterprise.

Business journals command the high ground in local business news coverage in many metropolitan markets. They have hired dozens of reporters and editors cast aside by faltering dailies. And increasingly, it is business journal reporters who are called upon as experts by other media.

The largest operator of business journals is Charlotte, N.C.-based American City, founded in 1985. A unit of Advance Publications, it publishes business journals in 40 communities. Crain’s and a Southern California group led by the Los Angeles Business Journal, also are recognized industry leaders.

But the post-recession environment presents real challenges to a business model and editorial approach that yielded growth in audience and stature for 25 years. In a world where barriers to entry are low and competition is only a mouse click away, weekly business journals have been forced to adapt their weekly print editions to a 24/7 news cycle.

And the rigorous schedule of special reports that’s common to most weeklies, the highly successful Book of Lists, will have to morph onto digital platforms such as tablets and smart phones.

The Early Years

Many of the earliest business journals were text-heavy and dull. They catered to a small group of bankers and lawyers willing to pay for listings of bankruptcies, lawsuits or new businesses.

But not all of them. Eugene Cervi, a maverick reporter who had worked at the Rocky Mountain News before joining The Denver Post, began publishing Cervi’s Rocky Mountain Journal in 1948. Cervi had left journalism for Democratic Party politics, and the populist New Dealer said his new weekly’s goal was to cover “cold-blooded economics.”

Cervi’s publication was a mix of economic reporting, briefs, gossip and an occasional investigative article. Favorite targets of his acerbic pen were the Public Service Company of Colorado and Denver Mayor Quigg Newton. On his death in 1970, the New York Times called Cervi “one of the most outspoken voices in American journalism.” His paper eventually changed its name to the Denver Business Journal, which now bills itself as the nation’s oldest weekly business newspaper.

The newspaper tried twice-weekly and even daily publication but settled on a once-a-week report, said Denver Business Journal Managing Editor Wayne Hicks who reported on the origins of business journals for the 50th anniversary of the Denver publication in 1998.

An emerging growth story.

In other parts of the country, viable business weeklies were getting established. In the early 1950s, the Long Island Business News found a niche publishing locally focused articles and attracting business-to-business advertisers in the fact-growing suburbs of New York City.

In 1977, Rance Crain, whose family owned trade publications such as Advertising Age, gave a speech at the Houston Advertising Club. There he learned about the success of the Houston Business Journal, which had been founded in 1971 as a way to chronicle that city’s rising fortunes in energy and commercial development. The Houston trip left an impression.

When the Chicago Daily News folded the next year, Crain used the moment to launch a weekly business publication. Crain’s Chicago Business, first published in 1978, rapidly became perhaps the most successful single startup in business journal history. Focusing on corporate strategy and overlooked but important business-to-business beats such as marketing and commercial real estate, Crain’s quickly established itself as a viable enterprise. Within two years Crain’s launched a second business publication in Cleveland, and in 1985 it launched Crain’s New York Business and Crain’s Detroit Business.

“The daily newspapers in Chicago covered the big companies in a dull plodding way, but they overlooked the large and growing number of small businesses,” said Dan Miller who helped launch Crain’s flagship as managing editor and served as editor and associate publisher for the next 15 years.

“In addition, their coverage of large companies was strictly press release stuff. The staffs had little appreciation for business strategy and tactics, or even what business was about,” he added. By trying to understand what made an emerging company successful, Crain’s tapped into the explosion of startups among privately held companies that were the hallmarks of the economic expansions of the 1980s and 1990s.

“The culture of the CCB newsroom from Day 1 was ‘get the scoop,’” said Miller. “The editors and staff knew that to survive we had to present readers with information they couldn’t get elsewhere.”

Crain’s didn’t hesitate to build its brand, producing a weekly news digest that it handed out to television and radio stations to get free air time. The success of Crain’s Chicago Business proved that a weekly business publication could be highly successful in large U.S. cities. But would a weekly business journal succeed in a smaller metro market? Four years after Crain’s Chicago Business made its debut, the launch of the Kansas City Business Journal took the first step toward establishing a chain of business weeklies with a strong presence in middle-market cities.

Co-founders Mike Russell and William “Doc” Worley combined three crucial ingredients:

• First, the economies of desktop publishing;
• Second, an editorial focus on specialized beats such as commercial real estate and financial services;
• Third, an entrepreneurial flair for marketing and promotion.

They put sizzle into the newspaper’s public record section with Top 25 Lists which then became the Book of Lists, a hot seller and a lucrative brand. By 1985 Russell and Worley formed American City Business Journals, folding eight operations, including one in Hawaii, under a single umbrella.

The company went public and rolled up a group of business publications owned by Scripps Howard, including the successor to Cervi’s Denver publication.

“The Kansas City Business Journal got started in 1982 or ’83, and it was a revelation,” said Charlie Crumpley, a former Kansas City Times staff writer who has been editor of the Los Angeles Business Journal since 2005. “Their stories were local, granular and transaction-based. They picked up local conflicts that we missed and they often were first with stories about companies or banks that were starting to show signs of financial distress. It was a bit of a shock because an upstart was showing us — a 100-year-old institution — how it should be done.”

But American City had taken on too much debt in its bold expansion and the company’s stock cratered after the 1987 market crash. Several operations, including its Los Angeles journal, were sold off. In 1989, a partnership led by former Dow Jones & Co. President Ray Shaw and Oklahoma City publisher Edward Gaylord bought a majority interest in American City and moved its headquarters to Charlotte.

Shaw’s purchase proved to be timely and highly profitable. He raised editorial standards, pushed for more projects and better design and created cross-training opportunities for top editors. He also put his stamp on the entire group, eschewing political endorsements on op-ed pages and pressing editors and publishers to transfer successful ideas between large markets such as Atlanta, Philadelphia and Dallas and smaller cities such as Albany, Wichita and Jacksonville.

One of the biggest problems was staff turnover. As dailies beefed up their business news departments in the early 1990s they could cherry pick up-and-coming business journal staffers eager to seize the opportunity. In 1996, Shaw sold American City to the Newhouse’s Advance Publications for $268 million. He stayed on as chief executive until his death in 2009. His son Whit Shaw now runs the company.

The dawn of a new era

From the early 1980s until the financial crisis of 2008, business journals made steady and sometimes spectacular gains. “It was a classic bell curve,” said Mickey Maurer, the longtime owner of IBD Media, the parent of the Indianapolis Business Journal, one of the nation’s largest independents. “I bought in at the bottom and rode it to the top.”

Indeed, the onset of the digital age at first proved a bonus for business journals which could capitalize on ever-cheaper technology, email newsletters and growing events to expand their presence.

As metro newspapers cut back amid a plunge in classified and auto advertising, career paths reversed direction with former daily business editors and writers looking for stability at the local business journal. Maurer said his publication finds it easy to recruit and hire staff from daily competitors.

But the past five years have forced business journals to adapt to a new reality. The changing media scene and sluggish economic recovery signal that the “glory days” are over, said Maurer, who added: “I don’t think it’s going to be business as usual.” In addition to a number of advertisers abandoning print for the Web, business journals rely on the U.S. Postal Service for delivery. With postal rates rising and service being cut back, the delivery system that has worked well for decades may not be sustainable.

Many veterans of the industry think that business journals will find ways to maneuver through a transition that’s already under way. Social media can elevate the profile of a niche publication and drive attendance at increasingly popular awards events such as “40 Under 40” dinners, celebrating successful young professionals, or health care summits. Digital paywalls and applications that are tablet-friendly and adaptable to smart phones are allowing business journal subscribers to access their accounts on the road or around the globe.

“The new technology is very disruptive to business journals, but we will figure it out and thrive,” said Maurer.

Former Crain’s Editor Miller thinks that business journals can find ways to refresh their print publications. “In the future, regional business pubs can digest, excerpt and summarize national and international business news just as BusinessWeek did at the height of its influence,” he wrote in an email.

But Bernhard, the former American City editorial director, thinks continuity is the key. “It has taken the whole mix of ingredients, hard news, special sections, book of lists, records, events to make it work and some features that work in some cities don’t work in others,” he said. “As long as we remember local, local, local, all is good.”

Crumpley, at the Los Angeles Business Journal, agreed that local news that’s exclusive is the key to winning the competitive race whether online or in print. He said that he’s begun thinking about whether business journals should leverage their newfound status as community leaders to vet or endorse political candidates. But he said he’s not totally convinced it’s a good idea. “Endorsing candidates would be a big change,” he said.

He said he’s convinced prospects for young journalists are “not great but pretty good” in part because daily newspapers have shed so many staff that some replacement is inevitable. Business journals are competitive at entry level, and they appeal to the specialized, multitasking style of reporting that’s now being taught at many undergraduate journalism programs.

Whether the platform is digital, print or a hybrid, business journals have substantial influence in metropolitan markets across North America. Bernhard said that as the economy emerges from recession, smaller companies are looking for information about how to cut expenses, how to deal with health care reform and how to succeed in the 21st century.

“There needs to be a redefining of old beats that recognizes businesses as consumers and concentrates on how they can improve efficiency through the use of technology,” said Bernhard (right).

In the 1970s and 1980s, business journals stumbled on to a huge story — how businesses were adapting to dramatic changes in technology and the economy. They took advantage of the declining cost of publishing software and technology to build substantial news operations.

To survive in the 21st century, business journals will have to keep their entrepreneurial edge but not lose sight of the old-school values of beat development, scoops and detailed reporting that are the foundation of their success. It may be tempting to look for cost-cutting formulas or a cookie-cutter approach but that may not be the way to operate for the long run.

Bernhard thinks that part of the successful formula is recognizing that ideas don’t always translate exactly from one market to another.

“The local business news strategy is rock solid and unchallenged,” said Miller.

By Rory O’Connor

Rory J. O’Connor is a senior vice president and partner in the Corporate Reputation practice of Fleishman-Hillard. He came to PR after a 21-year career as a print journalist, including 10 years with the San Jose Mercury News in San Jose and Washington, D.C. covering technology companies and Internet policy.

These days, when someone in PR talks about a newsroom, chances are they don’t mean the editorial offices of The Wall Street Journal or CNBC. They are talking about the kind of newsroom you’ll find on the website of a company such as Pacific Gas and Electric (an F-H client, in the interest of full disclosure) the public utility for northern California.

While the company’s PR team maintains traditional relationships with the local, regional and national media covering major stories involving its business, the company’s online newsroom now represents one of the main ways PG&E provides information and its point of view to customers, investors and anyone else with an interest in the company.

PG&E’s newsroom is much more than the “For the Media” section of a typical company website, which often is just a repository of news releases, fact sheets and annual reports for reference by the media. Launched in 2010, PG&E Currents is written, designed and presented much like the website of a local newspaper or TV station.

There are lead stories, topically arranged sections and local stories tagged and searchable by community. It features candid news photos, infographics and even short videos on everything from pipeline safety to community events. The content is produced and edited by a staff that includes several former journalists.

PG&E’s newsroom is hardly unique. But it is a demonstration of how changing information consumption habits – driven today by social networks and mobile devices – have changed the way PR thinks of and approaches its job. PR’s responsibility today is establishing and maintaining a direct line of communication with a company’s customers, suppliers, investors and the public to reach audiences where they are looking for information. That is key to maintain a company’s reputation and support its business goals.

In some ways, this approach isn’t new at all. Companies have turned to PR to help tell their stories and shape their reputations since the profession was born more than a century ago. PR practitioners have used some combination of interaction with the media and direct communication to tell their stories, through newsletters to staged events to celebrity endorsements to speak “unfiltered” to the widest possible audience.

But in a world where the media controlled the major conduits between companies and their key audiences, the business of PR was fairly straightforward. PR departments and agencies, mostly staffed by former journalists, used the relationships and knowledge gained in their former line of work to help clients get coverage. In turn, companies measured the success or failure of their campaigns by weight: Number of clips, airtime minutes, readers, or viewers.

The Internet’s commercial debut in 1993 began the media’s decline as the major gatekeeper between company and audience. And as media newsroom budgets shrank, readers and viewers looked elsewhere for information. With the cost of entry on the Internet effectively zero, they found it. Today, there are millions of blogs, and anyone with a camera-equipped mobile phone can be a “citizen reporter” – or at least, a citizen who posts images of what she sees and experiences.

It’s new competition for the professional media, although sometimes these new “reporters” intersect with traditional media, such as the gallery of blizzard photos from Instagram posted by The New York Times in February 2013.

As consumers have changed where they get their information, they also have changed how they form their opinions about brands and products. A company’s reputation now is influenced largely by what audiences read and see online – from companies directly, and as they share in their social communities.

The Fleishman-Hillard Global 2012 Digital Influence Index found that 66 percent of consumers in the United States and seven other major economies used online information in forming purchase decisions, compared to 43 percent for newspapers and 42 percent for TV. Perhaps more telling is that nearly half of those surveyed (42 percent) currently follow or “friend” a brand on a social networking site.

Nearly one in five individuals now looks to Facebook to obtain information about a brand or product, and almost two out of three consumers surveyed use a mobile/smartphone to gain information on a brand, product or destination at least three or four days a week.

Companies, aware of the new importance of direct conversations with customers, now expect PR to deliver not just coverage but protect and enhance reputation. In fact, many companies now employ chief communications officers who have a seat at the top management table.

This combination of consumer habit and corporate expectation means the work of PR professionals is now much the same as journalists: producing content. That content must be in a variety of formats and in an array of places so that consumers encounter it where they choose to spend time online. (It’s no accident that, as with traditional media sites, PG&E Currents links to the company’s Facebook page with 209,000 “Likes” and Twitter feed with 12,500 followers.) In fact, PR has become an increasingly complex discipline that is taking on roles once held by separate marketing, advertising and digital departments or agencies.

Think of this in four buckets: Paid communications (such as ads); Earned media, the outcome of the traditional PR/news relationship; Shared communications, which are social networks like Twitter; and “owned” content, such as PG&E’s newsroom or a company CEO’s blog. This “PESO” approach is important because of the ways in which all the channels are increasingly linked.

Online ads targeted to the screens of select consumers and postings on social media channels work together to inform consumers of a new product, for example. They in turn interest consumers in visiting the company’s website or Facebook page to get access to other materials about the product — perhaps a YouTube video demonstration. The buzz that’s created also generates media interest, and the resulting stories or product reviews can be communicated quickly to customers through Tweets or links on the company newsroom.

To be effective in this model, PR professionals must focus on identifying those individuals who are the crucial influencers in social conversations. These are the important people to whom we need to tell a company’s stories, because this “shared” information actually drives coverage and opinions.

In fact, it’s often the most effective way to reach the media. Overstretched reporters wear out mouse pads instead of shoe leather and read those same online sources and monitor the same social channels to identify stories, trends, controversies, problems and the like. So the content created by PR and distributed is now one of the chief ways to reach the media – although, by the time the media cover a story, it’s likely people’s positions have formed.

Besides the diminished emphasis on traditional earned media, another fundamental change is that PR has become a routine 24/7 operation, not just when there is a crisis. The Internet and social networks themselves operate to increase transparency by companies. When anyone can talk to anyone, when the stories a company tells in one channel can be compared to what it says in another, when supporters and critics can engage in a conversation and present their own data to bolster their case, companies who are inconsistent or opaque will see their reputations suffer – and do so very rapidly indeed.

For example, AT&T (also a major Fleishman-Hillard client) maintains a newsroom like PG&E and also a global staff constantly monitoring posts on its Facebook page and relevant Twitter traffic. Those teams respond immediately and directly to comments on those social networks, as well as to alert the rest of the organization when necessary.

In part, this serves as a valuable early warning system for service problems or the kind of customer complaint that, unresolved, could turn into the basis for negative media coverage.
But it’s also about reaching key audiences effectively. Consumers who get a quick response to a complaint or problem directly from the company are more likely to form a positive opinion of the company. AT&T’s Facebook page has been “liked” by 3.8 million other Facebook users — more than the readership claimed by USA Today and on par with the January 2013 Nielsen ratings for the “Today” show. That makes it a more important “channel.”

Does this mean PR and the media are growing permanently apart?

No. Earned media remains an important part of the PR mix. If it wasn’t, then Tesla CEO Elon Musk never would have directly responded, in great detail, to The New York Times and reporter John M. Broder about a negative automobile review in February 2013.

Both the audience provided by the media, and the credibility of coverage from aggressive and honest reporters who either validate or debunk a business’ messages, remain important to the public and shapes reputation. It keeps businesses honest and forces them to be transparent – which is good for shareholders, customers, employees and the public.

In addition, the noise level online is tremendous – one reason companies choose to create their own newsrooms. The media by their nature cut through that noise because their audiences seek out the information they provide.

It’s incumbent on PR in this new reality to understand the changes on the other side of the fence and work harder to provide journalists what they need. So PR professionals are changing how they provide and present information, using the content created for other channels and shaping it to the needs of reporters, editors and producers.

Few people would want to return to the days of mailed press releases, “blast faxes” and back-slapping press agents. Even in an era where social networks and company content dominate the world of PR, maintaining a professional relationship, and an understanding of what each journalist needs to do their job, remains important to PR professionals and their companies or clients.

More than ever, PR shares in common with journalists the work of storytelling. And a well-fashioned story, based on the facts, is still the only one worth telling.